Customer Service Purgatory

MSN has released their second ranking of customer service bad guys from a 7,000 person study and ranked the top ten as a Hall of Shame winners. I have to agree that this is particularly a bad idea and cannot understand a company who does not put an effort into service for their customers.

I used to have QWest for my home phone service and was so frustrated with their customer service I quite them and went local, and have never looked back. I was having problems and eveytime I would call it would be the usual wait for someone human after navigating the robot operator menus and finally get told by someone with very poor english that I would have to wait a few weeks for that to get resolved.

There were other problems like trying to stop the service itself, I could not talk to the customer service representative, I had to talk to their supervisor in order to get the service turned off and to get the overpaid $40 sent back to me and I had to really convince them that I wanted the money back. Just the fact that I had to argue for almost an hour with someone to convince them that I wanted my money back and wanted nothing to do with their company was reason enough for me.

Now I get the obligatory phone call about once every other month begging me to come back to QWest and I tell them why? I can get my home phone service, high speed internet, real high speed not trumped up dial up, and a website hosting for $100 a month, can you match that? I usually get a long pause and then a back peddling that just makes my day. I then ask them about problems and where I can find solutions, down the block or some other state?

I have a local company for my phone and internet that has an office, their main office in town, so I can walk or drive to their office during business hours and rant and rave all I want in person for any problems. Better yet when I was having a problem getting my first laptop on the internet and connected I took it to their office, a help desk person came out from the back and we got it working, their fault and not mine but that is customer service. Not someone on a phone who wants to get you off the phone as soon as possible. I like my local phone and internet service and would have a hard time switching to anyone else. 702 Communications has done great by me and I highly recommend you see if you have a local phone company you can go with, customer service in person makes a world of difference.

That goes with anything really, if you can go with a local company that has a main office in your town you can get much better service as a general rule for customer service, its kind of hard to tell a customer in person to wait weeks for something or that they cannot help you. Try looking them in the eye when your having a problem and want help, this usually gets them to at least do something instead of always having the option to say we're sorry and hang up.

Local service in person gets more done for you and you always have the option to walk to the supervisor and tell them what you think of their company.